Music to my ears

I love work; it fascinates me; I can sit and watch it for hours.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

I love that quote; it fascinates me. It fascinates me because it applies to me. It not only applies to me in case of work but for a lot of other things as well. I love cricket, soccer, tennis, carom, chess, acting, dancing, singing, playing musical instruments. All of them fascinate me while I sit and watch/ listen to them for hours. But when it comes to doing any of them, I'm a big failure.

Take music for example. I simply can't live without it. Living without breakfast is no problem, but a day without music? That's unthinkable. However, nobody can claim to have heard me singing outside my bathroom. The only musical instrument I ever tried playing seriously (if you don't count a tiny electronic instrument called a 'mini piano' that I had) was my mouth organ, and although many people play it with ease, I never got a tune out of it. But ask anybody in my office, and they will tell you that they see me wearing headphones whole day. My PC definitely contains more GBs in the form of songs than in the form of work-related data. When I was in Chennai for two months, I became so desperate that I used to listen to Tamil songs on radio in the night.

Which brings us to the question at hand: which songs do I listen to most? When Bidisha tagged me with this question, I started thinking. I play a wide variety of songs- Bangla, Hindi and English. Some of them are old, some are new, some all time favourites, and some only popular because of the latest hit at the box office. Most often I mix them up in a single long playlist, start it and forget about it. Should I give a list of the songs that I have played most number of times in my life? Or should I come up with the songs played most frequently in the last one month? I finally combined these options, and here they are, in no particular order. The ten twenty of my most played tracks, which I love to hear repeatedly, sometimes even in a loop. I have been playing some of them for the last few years, others I have come across only recently but have played them innumerable times. Note that it does not necessarily mean that these are my twenty favourite songs. Debabrata Biswas's "Akash bhara surjya tara" or "Purano sei diner katha" would have topped the list in that case. It merely indicates that these are my favourites among the songs that I have on my PC.

• Bhalobaasi Bhalobaasi ~ Indrani Sen
• My Favourite Things ~ Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music)
• Annie's Song ~ John Denver
• Krishnokoli Ami Tarei Boli ~ Suchitra Mitra
• Aanewala Pal ~ Kishore Kumaar (Golmaal)
• Abak Prithibi ~ Hemanta Mukherjee
• Ami Chini Go Chini Tomaare ~ Kishore Kumar (Charulata) [Along with the video]
• Shukno Patar Nupur Paye ~ Feroza Begum
• Hotel California ~ Eagles
• Country Roads Take Me Home ~ John Denver
• Summer Of 69 ~ Bryan Adams
• Aha Aaji E Basante ~ Indrani Sen.
• Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon ~ Lata Mangeshkar
• Radha Kaise Na Jale ~ Asha Bhosle (Lagaan)
• My Heart Will Go On ~ Celine Dion (Titanic)
• Memories Are Made Of This ~ Jim Reeves
• Phoolon Ke Rang Se ~ Kishore Kumar (Prem Pujari)
• Tomake Chai ~ Suman Chatterjee
• Salil Chowdhury Hits - Soft Instrumentals ~ Tabun
• Western Classical Tracks ~ Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Bach etc.

Whew! That was a lot of work! The last two are not single tracks though, but then, I play all of them together. Out of these, “Krishnokoli” is the only track that I couldn’t find on my hard disk. I probably deleted it by accident. But I have included it here because it was with me till recently and I used to play it a lot. And I realized that I have very little choice in Rabindrasangeet here… actually I left some of the CDs back at home last time. Also, there are way too many Kishore Kumar songs that I love. Selecting some of them was really very difficult.

I pass on this tag to Crys, Awry, Kaddu and KM (if they wish to take it up) and any of my readers who might wish to do it.

Among other things, I designed a new banner for the top panel of this blog. It shows the new cable stayed bridge over the Yamuna in Allahabad on the left, and the Allahabad Cathedral on the right. This is the first banner made entirely from photos taken by me. All the previous ones contained at least one downloaded image. More new banners will be coming soon, and if everything goes as planned, a slight change in the tagline of my blog will follow. But that’s not happening till much later, say early next year.

Till then, life remains the same old joyful experience- from Hooghly to Hyderabad.